Overview

Tasked with creating a system I would find useful for my personal life or a potential client’s business, I decided to rebuild my existing recipe tracker from Notion in Airtable.

🎥 See a quick walkthrough of the process below!

Before

A few months ago, I created a recipe tracker in Notion that looked like this. At a glance, you saw an enticing image, the name of the recipe, the source (linked), how many ingredients were missing, and a personal rating.

Here's the backend. Recipes were linked to one another to easily decide on pairings using Relation. Other properties included:

Category: Meals, Snacks, Sandwiches/Wraps, Desserts, Sauces/Dressings, etc.

Energy needed to make this recipe: Low, Medium, High

Main ingredients needed and optional ingredients

Preparation: Instant Pot, Stovetop, Oven, Blender, etc.

Tags: Vegan, Chicken, Pork, Dairy, Vegetarian, Seafood, etc.

The recipe view provided a helpful overview of what was needed. Yet to see which specific ingredients were out of stock and whether the recommended pairing to the meal was ready to make, multiple additional clicks were required.

After

However, as much as I love Notion for other aspects of my life, Airtable was calling to me in all its colourful glory ✨

Aesthetic overview of data, while featuring the most important fields at a glance (e.g. number of ingredients missing)

Easily add and filter records based on a variety of criteria (category, energy required, preparation, etc.)

Fewer columns and formula workarounds were needed to display the same information.

Linked records between tables, for a more in-depth overview of a record

Now I can easily see which ingredients are in stock, their location in my house, and determine what substitutions can be made for those out of stock.

Just like Notion, the ingredients live in a separate table as records.

Automation through Zapier to add new recipes directly from Google Chrome

As a workaround to Airtable's Web Clipper app (only available on the Pro Plan), I set up a Zap using the Zapier Chrome Extension to add new recipes to my recipe tracker as I find them online!

While you may not be looking to setup your own recipe tracker, this project made me so happy because I got to make an existing system of mine more beautiful and more efficient in the long run!

Let's make you just as happy in your business! Auditing, optimizing, and delivering systems that WORK (and don't hurt your head trying to understand them) – schedule a Discovery Call with me today!